I foresee some new difficulties in store for Apple with the introduction of a low-end desktop. Most of these users will probably be switchers, so they will need a pile of information, that is not easy for the completely clueless to find. For example, many of them will have trouble getting software. In the past, they just picked it up at Walmart. Since Walmart carries few or no Mac titles, these people will be lost. This will cause a lot of bad "word of mouth" advertising for macs, unless Apple is ready for it. Adding a software link to the default home page of Safari would be a very good start. It should probably be something that links to hardcopies my mail and shareware and freeware downloads.
Another issue will be people who expect their old software to run, or at least expect to be able to upgrade to a mac version for an upgrade price. Apple should provide some very clear info here about emulation options, alternative software, etc.
In general, I think a low-end mac could be very good for Apple, and it might give them a chance to enter into the business desktop market. It could also blow up in their faces. If all goes well the author of "Making your old Windows POS into a Linux server that will work with your Mac" will be a rich man.
Well, yours is the best example so far. After a protracted court battle, someone made money 40 years ago. I'm sure there are more recent examples, but the fact that no one has knows of or has mentioned any is really indicative of how broken the system is.
If you read the article you would know that they mention that no one could see the potential of his work, and no one was interested in it. Also, since the invention was owned by his lab, and then by a start-up (of which he was a part) he did not have much say to begin with.
Wouldn't that just destroy the incentive companies have for hiring these innovative people, thus leavin them without a job?
I don't think so. Not if it were still legal to contract to give something like 90% of the profit from said invention to a company that funds your research. The trick is that no inventor should be able to give away all their rights to an invention. This has been tried with intellectual property in several countries, resulting in all art being created on contract so that the original creator did not have rights to start with. This too must be protected against. If an inventor is guaranteed at least 1% of the profit from his inventions, then they will at least make something. Isn't that what patents are supposed to be about? Shouldn't we be protecting inventors and encouraging them to invent?
An anonymous coward calls someone a pussy? Look in the mirror coward. He never had the rights, just a share in a company that did. Legally, he had little or no recourse, and at the time no lawyer would have thought it was going to make any money. Nakamura may have won his case, but not before he was making good money at another job. He also won in the Japanese court system, not the U.S. Get a clue.
Just fucking patent everything you invent and only after that decide what you're going to do with it.
I agree. In fact everyone should just pay and go to law school for a years so that they can easily patent things themselves, and defend their rights. Also, everyone should inherit millions so they can afford to pay a team of high priced lawyers to fight on their behalf all the time. This idiot did not only not go to law school, but he did not inherit any money. I mean what was this idiot doing trying to invent something new? That is just stupid. Everyone knows it is easier to just patent something obvious then use your lawyers to intimidate people who can't afford to pay legal fees to fight you.
Does anyone care to point out any times the patent system has helped to foster innovation or protected the little guy in the last 10 years? If you did not read the article maybe you missed the part of the article where they state the patent was owned by the lab where he worked, and then transferred to a startup after the lab could not afford to fight the big companies in court. The startup eventually won in court and did make money, but not before they laid-off the inventor of the tech they were making money on. Here's an idea that might be useful, lets make patents only available to people, not companies. That way they can protect inventors, and not be used to suck money out of people who actually innovate and make things. Then we could finally get those flying cars they have been showing in movies about the future for the last hundred years.
Ok. So what you're saying is that even when a woman says "Yes" it may mean "No" and if that's the case she may later bring up charges and I'll be convicted as a rapist?
The above is legally the case in only a few very specific circumstances. In some states if a woman willingly says "yes" but is in a certain age range (16-17), or is under the influence of an intoxicant, and later decides that she was taken advantage of, it can still legally be considered rape. In normal circumstances, if a woman says "yes" (while not under duress and you can prove it) then there is no legal case for rape.
OK, this is obviously a touchy issue. Yes, the previous poster's numbers were poorly thought out. Yes, rape and sexual assault are a lot more common than is generally supposed. No, the survey he described was probably not accurate. Its questions were vague and poorly worded. "Did you have sex when you did not want to" is not equivalent to "were you raped?", nor is it equivalent to "were you sexually harassed?" I know women who had sex because they though it would make them popular, because they wanted someone to like them, from peer pressure, or because they wanted something from the person they were having sex with. This in not rape, but in all of these instances women would probably answer yes to the question in the survey. This is getting way off topic from spam stats.
RTFA, the spammers aren't in america, the zombied boxes they use to relay spam are.
I usually don't look at spam anymore as my filters work quite well, but I don't recall getting more than one or two messages that were not directed at English speakers. Most of the ads seemed to be for American companies as well. Maybe the companies sending the spam are not in the U.S., but those doing the advertising certainly seem to be U.S. companies. Has this changed?
I'm hearing that a lot of linux newbies are running full blown sendmail servers on their home connections, and don't know how to set them up properly, so they happily allow people to anonymously relay mail through them.
Sounds like there is a serious usability issue then. Shouldn't sendmail default to a reasonable configuration? Most newbies I know change as little of the configuration as possible to get something working.
There is a rumor that Quicktime will begin supporting OGG without needing a plug-in with the new version (supposedly) to be released at the macworld expo in a few weeks. If this happens, it is likely that support will be added to the iPod as well. Further, I have read that the hardware in the iPod can already support OGG decoding, it is just not implemented in the software. keep your fingers crossed as this could be a boon to OGG in general allowing playback on numerous windows and mac machines.
It's funny, Apple did everything right in this case. They filed a john doe lawsuit, then subpoenaed the web sites for information of their informant. If you had someone sign an NDA then showed them your top-secret project, would you do any less? I can see news sites refusing to answer the subpoenas as a matter of journalistic integrity in the case of a whistle blower, but this is not a case of wrongdoing, just a simple contract dispute. Despite doing everything above board here, half the posts are still criticizing Apple for trying to enforce their contracts. They did not threaten the web sites, one of which MS did just last week. They did not file any lawsuits against the web sites. What more could you ask?
Actually, yes. MS did do a lot of work to make.NET cross platform, they just didn't actually implement it on multiple platforms, though they did release Rotor for BSD.
And yet, this program only works on Windows. That does not sound very cross-platform to me. Also, aren't there serious licensing problems with Rotor?
What is the point of ISO standardization if you don't intend it to be cross platform?
It's called marketing and it seems to be working. Sort of like Word's XML support. MS complies as much as they have to appear to be playing nice and implementing features to gullible people. They make sure to play unfairly enough that it makes no difference. Anyone who trusts MS ought to have their head examined.
What kind of filters do you use in your coffee maker? They are probably different from mine. If you have a different brand car than me, you probably have a different style of brakes. Your cell phone charger will most likely not fit my phone, etc.
This is irrelevant. There are big portions of the market that demand compatibility. If you buy a DVD, you expect it to play in any DVD player. If you buy a movie or song, you expect it to play on any player, unless you are one of the few tech-saavy people out there.
Regardless, the OEM software bundles you received were a nice add-on. Unfortunately, the ability to play audio and video files is expected. Its what 'computers' do. They double click the file and they expect it to open.
Actually I don't expect all of them to play. But if consumers demand it, they all the players will have to be compatible or they will fail.
I think there are battles to fight with MS, I just don't think this is one of them.
There are several major battles against MS that are really important. This is one of them. If MS is given the keys to all media on computers, they will further entrench their OS lock-in. Would you buy a computer where you could not listen to any music or watch any movies legally? What about when this is the only mechanism for consumption of media in the home? Will you buy two computers one for media and one for everything else?
You statements are all about how MS is not a problem for you now, well bundling IE was not a problem for anyone five years ago. Now the portions of the internet and a huge number of businesses are IE only. Browser development has drastically slowed and many people who are very technically competent, have to pay MS because it is the only way to do their jobs. I think you are being very short sighted.
It is true, that computer resellers add software, but they rarely, if ever, remove it. This means that since MS owns the desktop, they can add anything and push everyone else out. Want to sell video, well windows media is on all the boxes, why sell it as quicktime or real or anything else? Everyone already has Windows media format because MS bundled it. Hence the unfair advantage over other vendors.
That won't happen. That would imply they support whatever application it is. They'll just ship it without it.
Hmm, I guess all that OEM software I used to get with computers was just a dream then. Plenty of computer companies used to, and still do bundle office suites, Internet packages, video games, etc. with their boxes. This just makes MS play on equal ground with Real and Apple. Now computer sellers get to pick which one, and there may even be a push for OPEN FORMATS, that everyone can read and write so that all of the players will work together. I know that is a crazy concept to people who have been living in a MS ruled software industry, but it is how things work in every other fricking industry.
I don't consider Microsoft to be a monopoly, because no law forces you to use their OS.
Similarly Standard Oil was not a monopoly because you could go refine oil yourself, or use whale fat. Heck you did not need to use oil at all, just make a torch.
Name me one other company that sells operating systems and makes a profit on it. Apple makes it's money on the hardware. So does Sun. IBM makes it on services and hardware. RedHat makes money on services. All of these companies will sell you an OS, but none of them could survive in business trying to sell OSs.
You argue that intel had a monopoly on computer chips, which is wrong, but lets assume they did. What markets did they leverage with that monopoly? Did they give away free RAM with their CPUs? Did they give away free anything?
Monopolies occur when a market is cornered. MS owns the OS space. No one else can make money selling OSs, even when the product is better. OS2 was arguably better. BeOS, and Next were both far better. If Apple sold OS X for X86 today, Microsoft would stomp them, despite OS X being better in the opinion of pretty much everyone I know who has tried it. The reason is that MS controls all the sales channels, they have massive influence on all software developers, and they have piles of money gained from their illegal business practices that they can use to bribe and buy out anyone they want. Linux is the ultimate proof of MS's monopoly. When your strongest competitor is a free product produced by people in their spare time, outside of the normal business channels (and people are willing to work long hours for free to have an alternative) then the market is broken and capitalism has failed.
Can you imagine how different the world would be if MS had not destroyed the software industry with their illegal practices? Imagine if all the companies they purchased and killed had actually sold their products. Imagine if the web and all networking functioned according to open standards and was not held back by having to work with IE's 5 year old broken versions of everything? Imagine if malware writers and worm writers had to try to make their system work on 5 different platforms. Imagine if all software did run on all computers. Imagine if the best product was the one used. Imagine if the voice recognition software that worked but was buggy 9 years ago was actually developed instead of killed. Imagine if my favorite game company was not assimilated and turned into a dumbed down crap factory. Imagine if you could make a word processing document 400 pages long, with some graphics, and send it to someone else, and they could read it, an easily edit it. What a crazy and unreasonable expectation.
The software industry is at least 5 years behind where it would have been if MS had not engaged in illegal business practices, and probably more like 10 years.
Why can Apple and the various Linux distributions add whatever they want to their OS's, but not Microsoft?
Because they are not monopolies.
Ford can give away a lifetime supply of pork with every car. This is not illegal because ford is not a monopoly. If Ford was a monopoly, 93% of people bought cars from Ford, no other car companies existed, and you only other option was to build your own, or buy a yacht that comes with a free car, then everyone who bought a car would get a lifetime supply of pork. Pork sellers would all go out of business. Ford would be a monopoly in pork and cars and would decide to bundle a lifetime supply of batteries with their cars, and so on. If not for anti-bundling laws Rockefeller would own everything in the U.S. right now.
You seem to have things backwards. MS is not a monopoly because they are bundling things. Monopolies are where one company or group or individual has cornered a market to the point that they can stifle competition. MS has a monopoly in operating systems. If you try to sell operating systems to compete with MS you have basically no chance of succeeding, according to both the U.S. and EU courts. When a company is a monopoly, they have escaped from the competition that makes a capitalist system work. At this point they can take other people's money, without providing a reasonable amount of work or product in exchange. Because capitalism fails to deal with monopolies, most economic systems are actually regulated capitalism, where special provisions are made for monopolies.
The most common provision is that monopolies cannot use their monopoly to gain another monopoly. If this was not the case then you would be employed by, and purchase everything you own from Mr. Rockefeller who cornered the U.S. oil market many years ago. Another important point to remember, is that without competition an industry has little or no incentive to innovate. If one company made all automobiles, why would they bother making improvements? Even worse, there is incentive for them to make their products fail after a period of time, or build in flaws, which allow them to make another sale in the future.
To make an analogy, if someone had a monopoly on cars, and no one could compete against them in the car market, that is legal in the U.S. If, they decide to give a "free" lifetime supply of pork with every car purchase (which they paid for with their car monopoly) that would be illegal. If right now Ford motors decides to give away a lifetime supply of pork with every car purchase, that is legal. If in our theoretical situation a company produces aircraft carriers, and sells special cars that drive back and forth across the aircraft carrier (but which only work there and and are not significant to the market) decides to give away a lifetime supply of pork with their special aircraft carrier cars, that is also legal. If some group of rogue engineers that makes free cars out scrap metal in their spare time decides to give away a lifetime supply of pork with their free cars, that is also legal. The only thing that is illegal is for the monopoly to do it, in order to gain another monopoly. It would make all pork sellers go out of business since everyone gets it free with their car, and it would give our theoretical car monopoly a monopoly in both cars and pork.
If apple was ever to break out of the niche market, would their inclusion of iTunes and Quicktime be considered abuse of Monopoly? Everyone seems to be fine with it now.
OK, I know this is really hard for some people to understand, but having a monopoly causes capitalism to fail. Capitalism works because of competition. Without competition capitalism just funnels money from one group to another without any work being done.
No one complains about Apple bundling itunes or quicktime because they are not a monopoly. If Apple was a monopoly (not just 50% of the market but enough to make going with someone else pretty much impossible) we would be complaining about their DRM and their bundling.
We complained that Internet Explorer was shipped with windows, and now it's been completely integrated into windows, justifying arguements against removing it.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say here. Slashdot complained loudly about the inclusion of a program with a dominant OS, that put everyone else out of business and destroyed an open standard. Now as a defensive measure that program is not only bundled, but welded on to the OS, resulting in the same as above and huge security problems for MS.
Will the same sort of thing happen with Media Player?
Will MS keep giving tons of money to politicians? Yes, it will be built in and the U.S. government will either do nothing or take so long to do anything that it is too late. Hopefully other countries will not be so easily bribed and will decide instead to capitalize on the popularity of anti-americanism to get re-elected.
Unfortunately it vanished when my massive new 1.2 gig drive failed years and years ago. I'll ask if anyone still has a copy, but it was still pretty unfinished when I gave up on it. You had to edit a config file on your server in order to set up an entry. There is a windows program by the same name, although it does not look like anyone has touched it in a few years either.
Slashdot Mirror
I foresee some new difficulties in store for Apple with the introduction of a low-end desktop. Most of these users will probably be switchers, so they will need a pile of information, that is not easy for the completely clueless to find. For example, many of them will have trouble getting software. In the past, they just picked it up at Walmart. Since Walmart carries few or no Mac titles, these people will be lost. This will cause a lot of bad "word of mouth" advertising for macs, unless Apple is ready for it. Adding a software link to the default home page of Safari would be a very good start. It should probably be something that links to hardcopies my mail and shareware and freeware downloads.
Another issue will be people who expect their old software to run, or at least expect to be able to upgrade to a mac version for an upgrade price. Apple should provide some very clear info here about emulation options, alternative software, etc.
In general, I think a low-end mac could be very good for Apple, and it might give them a chance to enter into the business desktop market. It could also blow up in their faces. If all goes well the author of "Making your old Windows POS into a Linux server that will work with your Mac" will be a rich man.
Well, yours is the best example so far. After a protracted court battle, someone made money 40 years ago. I'm sure there are more recent examples, but the fact that no one has knows of or has mentioned any is really indicative of how broken the system is.
If you read the article you would know that they mention that no one could see the potential of his work, and no one was interested in it. Also, since the invention was owned by his lab, and then by a start-up (of which he was a part) he did not have much say to begin with.
Wouldn't that just destroy the incentive companies have for hiring these innovative people, thus leavin them without a job?
I don't think so. Not if it were still legal to contract to give something like 90% of the profit from said invention to a company that funds your research. The trick is that no inventor should be able to give away all their rights to an invention. This has been tried with intellectual property in several countries, resulting in all art being created on contract so that the original creator did not have rights to start with. This too must be protected against. If an inventor is guaranteed at least 1% of the profit from his inventions, then they will at least make something. Isn't that what patents are supposed to be about? Shouldn't we be protecting inventors and encouraging them to invent?
This Russell guy is just a fucking pussy geek
An anonymous coward calls someone a pussy? Look in the mirror coward. He never had the rights, just a share in a company that did. Legally, he had little or no recourse, and at the time no lawyer would have thought it was going to make any money. Nakamura may have won his case, but not before he was making good money at another job. He also won in the Japanese court system, not the U.S. Get a clue.
Just fucking patent everything you invent and only after that decide what you're going to do with it.
I agree. In fact everyone should just pay and go to law school for a years so that they can easily patent things themselves, and defend their rights. Also, everyone should inherit millions so they can afford to pay a team of high priced lawyers to fight on their behalf all the time. This idiot did not only not go to law school, but he did not inherit any money. I mean what was this idiot doing trying to invent something new? That is just stupid. Everyone knows it is easier to just patent something obvious then use your lawyers to intimidate people who can't afford to pay legal fees to fight you.
Does anyone care to point out any times the patent system has helped to foster innovation or protected the little guy in the last 10 years? If you did not read the article maybe you missed the part of the article where they state the patent was owned by the lab where he worked, and then transferred to a startup after the lab could not afford to fight the big companies in court. The startup eventually won in court and did make money, but not before they laid-off the inventor of the tech they were making money on. Here's an idea that might be useful, lets make patents only available to people, not companies. That way they can protect inventors, and not be used to suck money out of people who actually innovate and make things. Then we could finally get those flying cars they have been showing in movies about the future for the last hundred years.
Ok. So what you're saying is that even when a woman says "Yes" it may mean "No" and if that's the case she may later bring up charges and I'll be convicted as a rapist?
The above is legally the case in only a few very specific circumstances. In some states if a woman willingly says "yes" but is in a certain age range (16-17), or is under the influence of an intoxicant, and later decides that she was taken advantage of, it can still legally be considered rape. In normal circumstances, if a woman says "yes" (while not under duress and you can prove it) then there is no legal case for rape.
OK, this is obviously a touchy issue. Yes, the previous poster's numbers were poorly thought out. Yes, rape and sexual assault are a lot more common than is generally supposed. No, the survey he described was probably not accurate. Its questions were vague and poorly worded. "Did you have sex when you did not want to" is not equivalent to "were you raped?", nor is it equivalent to "were you sexually harassed?" I know women who had sex because they though it would make them popular, because they wanted someone to like them, from peer pressure, or because they wanted something from the person they were having sex with. This in not rape, but in all of these instances women would probably answer yes to the question in the survey. This is getting way off topic from spam stats.
RTFA, the spammers aren't in america, the zombied boxes they use to relay spam are.
I usually don't look at spam anymore as my filters work quite well, but I don't recall getting more than one or two messages that were not directed at English speakers. Most of the ads seemed to be for American companies as well. Maybe the companies sending the spam are not in the U.S., but those doing the advertising certainly seem to be U.S. companies. Has this changed?
I'm hearing that a lot of linux newbies are running full blown sendmail servers on their home connections, and don't know how to set them up properly, so they happily allow people to anonymously relay mail through them.
Sounds like there is a serious usability issue then. Shouldn't sendmail default to a reasonable configuration? Most newbies I know change as little of the configuration as possible to get something working.
There is a rumor that Quicktime will begin supporting OGG without needing a plug-in with the new version (supposedly) to be released at the macworld expo in a few weeks. If this happens, it is likely that support will be added to the iPod as well. Further, I have read that the hardware in the iPod can already support OGG decoding, it is just not implemented in the software. keep your fingers crossed as this could be a boon to OGG in general allowing playback on numerous windows and mac machines.
It's funny, Apple did everything right in this case. They filed a john doe lawsuit, then subpoenaed the web sites for information of their informant. If you had someone sign an NDA then showed them your top-secret project, would you do any less? I can see news sites refusing to answer the subpoenas as a matter of journalistic integrity in the case of a whistle blower, but this is not a case of wrongdoing, just a simple contract dispute. Despite doing everything above board here, half the posts are still criticizing Apple for trying to enforce their contracts. They did not threaten the web sites, one of which MS did just last week. They did not file any lawsuits against the web sites. What more could you ask?
True enough, but MS is one of their own customers. :)
Actually, yes. MS did do a lot of work to make .NET cross platform, they just didn't actually implement it on multiple platforms, though they did release Rotor for BSD.
And yet, this program only works on Windows. That does not sound very cross-platform to me. Also, aren't there serious licensing problems with Rotor?
What is the point of ISO standardization if you don't intend it to be cross platform?
It's called marketing and it seems to be working. Sort of like Word's XML support. MS complies as much as they have to appear to be playing nice and implementing features to gullible people. They make sure to play unfairly enough that it makes no difference. Anyone who trusts MS ought to have their head examined.
What kind of filters do you use in your coffee maker? They are probably different from mine. If you have a different brand car than me, you probably have a different style of brakes. Your cell phone charger will most likely not fit my phone, etc.
This is irrelevant. There are big portions of the market that demand compatibility. If you buy a DVD, you expect it to play in any DVD player. If you buy a movie or song, you expect it to play on any player, unless you are one of the few tech-saavy people out there.
Regardless, the OEM software bundles you received were a nice add-on. Unfortunately, the ability to play audio and video files is expected. Its what 'computers' do. They double click the file and they expect it to open.
Actually I don't expect all of them to play. But if consumers demand it, they all the players will have to be compatible or they will fail.
I think there are battles to fight with MS, I just don't think this is one of them.
There are several major battles against MS that are really important. This is one of them. If MS is given the keys to all media on computers, they will further entrench their OS lock-in. Would you buy a computer where you could not listen to any music or watch any movies legally? What about when this is the only mechanism for consumption of media in the home? Will you buy two computers one for media and one for everything else?
You statements are all about how MS is not a problem for you now, well bundling IE was not a problem for anyone five years ago. Now the portions of the internet and a huge number of businesses are IE only. Browser development has drastically slowed and many people who are very technically competent, have to pay MS because it is the only way to do their jobs. I think you are being very short sighted.
It is true, that computer resellers add software, but they rarely, if ever, remove it. This means that since MS owns the desktop, they can add anything and push everyone else out. Want to sell video, well windows media is on all the boxes, why sell it as quicktime or real or anything else? Everyone already has Windows media format because MS bundled it. Hence the unfair advantage over other vendors.
That won't happen. That would imply they support whatever application it is. They'll just ship it without it.
Hmm, I guess all that OEM software I used to get with computers was just a dream then. Plenty of computer companies used to, and still do bundle office suites, Internet packages, video games, etc. with their boxes. This just makes MS play on equal ground with Real and Apple. Now computer sellers get to pick which one, and there may even be a push for OPEN FORMATS, that everyone can read and write so that all of the players will work together. I know that is a crazy concept to people who have been living in a MS ruled software industry, but it is how things work in every other fricking industry.
I don't consider Microsoft to be a monopoly, because no law forces you to use their OS.
Similarly Standard Oil was not a monopoly because you could go refine oil yourself, or use whale fat. Heck you did not need to use oil at all, just make a torch.
Name me one other company that sells operating systems and makes a profit on it. Apple makes it's money on the hardware. So does Sun. IBM makes it on services and hardware. RedHat makes money on services. All of these companies will sell you an OS, but none of them could survive in business trying to sell OSs.
You argue that intel had a monopoly on computer chips, which is wrong, but lets assume they did. What markets did they leverage with that monopoly? Did they give away free RAM with their CPUs? Did they give away free anything?
Monopolies occur when a market is cornered. MS owns the OS space. No one else can make money selling OSs, even when the product is better. OS2 was arguably better. BeOS, and Next were both far better. If Apple sold OS X for X86 today, Microsoft would stomp them, despite OS X being better in the opinion of pretty much everyone I know who has tried it. The reason is that MS controls all the sales channels, they have massive influence on all software developers, and they have piles of money gained from their illegal business practices that they can use to bribe and buy out anyone they want. Linux is the ultimate proof of MS's monopoly. When your strongest competitor is a free product produced by people in their spare time, outside of the normal business channels (and people are willing to work long hours for free to have an alternative) then the market is broken and capitalism has failed.
Bribing politicians can't get them out of this one.
You will be surprised, but not in a good way.
Can you imagine how different the world would be
Can you imagine how different the world would be if MS had not destroyed the software industry with their illegal practices? Imagine if all the companies they purchased and killed had actually sold their products. Imagine if the web and all networking functioned according to open standards and was not held back by having to work with IE's 5 year old broken versions of everything? Imagine if malware writers and worm writers had to try to make their system work on 5 different platforms. Imagine if all software did run on all computers. Imagine if the best product was the one used. Imagine if the voice recognition software that worked but was buggy 9 years ago was actually developed instead of killed. Imagine if my favorite game company was not assimilated and turned into a dumbed down crap factory. Imagine if you could make a word processing document 400 pages long, with some graphics, and send it to someone else, and they could read it, an easily edit it. What a crazy and unreasonable expectation.
The software industry is at least 5 years behind where it would have been if MS had not engaged in illegal business practices, and probably more like 10 years.
Why can Apple and the various Linux distributions add whatever they want to their OS's, but not Microsoft?
Because they are not monopolies.
Ford can give away a lifetime supply of pork with every car. This is not illegal because ford is not a monopoly. If Ford was a monopoly, 93% of people bought cars from Ford, no other car companies existed, and you only other option was to build your own, or buy a yacht that comes with a free car, then everyone who bought a car would get a lifetime supply of pork. Pork sellers would all go out of business. Ford would be a monopoly in pork and cars and would decide to bundle a lifetime supply of batteries with their cars, and so on. If not for anti-bundling laws Rockefeller would own everything in the U.S. right now.
You seem to have things backwards. MS is not a monopoly because they are bundling things. Monopolies are where one company or group or individual has cornered a market to the point that they can stifle competition. MS has a monopoly in operating systems. If you try to sell operating systems to compete with MS you have basically no chance of succeeding, according to both the U.S. and EU courts. When a company is a monopoly, they have escaped from the competition that makes a capitalist system work. At this point they can take other people's money, without providing a reasonable amount of work or product in exchange. Because capitalism fails to deal with monopolies, most economic systems are actually regulated capitalism, where special provisions are made for monopolies.
The most common provision is that monopolies cannot use their monopoly to gain another monopoly. If this was not the case then you would be employed by, and purchase everything you own from Mr. Rockefeller who cornered the U.S. oil market many years ago. Another important point to remember, is that without competition an industry has little or no incentive to innovate. If one company made all automobiles, why would they bother making improvements? Even worse, there is incentive for them to make their products fail after a period of time, or build in flaws, which allow them to make another sale in the future.
To make an analogy, if someone had a monopoly on cars, and no one could compete against them in the car market, that is legal in the U.S. If, they decide to give a "free" lifetime supply of pork with every car purchase (which they paid for with their car monopoly) that would be illegal. If right now Ford motors decides to give away a lifetime supply of pork with every car purchase, that is legal. If in our theoretical situation a company produces aircraft carriers, and sells special cars that drive back and forth across the aircraft carrier (but which only work there and and are not significant to the market) decides to give away a lifetime supply of pork with their special aircraft carrier cars, that is also legal. If some group of rogue engineers that makes free cars out scrap metal in their spare time decides to give away a lifetime supply of pork with their free cars, that is also legal. The only thing that is illegal is for the monopoly to do it, in order to gain another monopoly. It would make all pork sellers go out of business since everyone gets it free with their car, and it would give our theoretical car monopoly a monopoly in both cars and pork.
Microsoft is not a monopoly.
According to both the U.S. and European courts, you are wrong. MS is legally a monopoly.
If apple was ever to break out of the niche market, would their inclusion of iTunes and Quicktime be considered abuse of Monopoly? Everyone seems to be fine with it now.
OK, I know this is really hard for some people to understand, but having a monopoly causes capitalism to fail. Capitalism works because of competition. Without competition capitalism just funnels money from one group to another without any work being done.
No one complains about Apple bundling itunes or quicktime because they are not a monopoly. If Apple was a monopoly (not just 50% of the market but enough to make going with someone else pretty much impossible) we would be complaining about their DRM and their bundling.
We complained that Internet Explorer was shipped with windows, and now it's been completely integrated into windows, justifying arguements against removing it.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say here. Slashdot complained loudly about the inclusion of a program with a dominant OS, that put everyone else out of business and destroyed an open standard. Now as a defensive measure that program is not only bundled, but welded on to the OS, resulting in the same as above and huge security problems for MS.
Will the same sort of thing happen with Media Player?
Will MS keep giving tons of money to politicians? Yes, it will be built in and the U.S. government will either do nothing or take so long to do anything that it is too late. Hopefully other countries will not be so easily bribed and will decide instead to capitalize on the popularity of anti-americanism to get re-elected.
Unfortunately it vanished when my massive new 1.2 gig drive failed years and years ago. I'll ask if anyone still has a copy, but it was still pretty unfinished when I gave up on it. You had to edit a config file on your server in order to set up an entry. There is a windows program by the same name, although it does not look like anyone has touched it in a few years either.